Video: You Have Never Seen A Gyro Go Bad Until You See This One Go Bad

Spin cycle much? This pilot, whose plane is sporting some vintage mechanical instruments in its panel, had the presence of mind to pull out his phone to catch this most amazing gyro failure ever. The post on Reddit, which has generated some hilarious comments, shows a short video of an artificial horizon gone bad. We've had Ais fail in flight, but generally those failures are described as the display "rolling over." This, in contrast, is a high-speed spin. If it was representing an actual spin of the plane, the roll rate would be, well, let's just say it would resemble the spin on a major league curveball.

For those of you who don't know, if that's anyone, mechanical attitude instruments depend on the property of spinning things, like tops and ice skaters, to stay very upright. The spinning is powered in most cases by vacuum power generated by the plane's vacuum pump. If that sounds like a Rube Goldberg solution to keeping a gryo spinning, we agree, though in defense of the approach, it was a great idea a hundred years ago when it got introduced. Spinning mechanical gyros are susceptible to failure, either because they break or the vacuum pump does. Both are common failure modes. (At one point you can see the plane's vacuum gauge apparently reading zero, which is not in the green.)

Solid state "gyros," which have replaced mechanical ones like this on almost every new plane and many older ones, are remarkably accurate and reliable. The failure of a vacuum pump in IMC is an emergency and has led to innumerable loss-of-control fatal accidents.

But the failure here was in VMC, and just as a horizon that rolls over isn't a reflection of reality, this isn't either, obviously. So commenters had fun with it. One wrote, "Try right rudder?" To which another added, "More right RUDDER!" Another quipped, "MEL that *^#^!," while another noted, "Laundry is almost done." But the winner, in our view anyway, was the commenter who noted, "The world, from the prop's perspective."